The Men Who Knew Too Much

Henry James and Alfred Hitchcock

Edited by Susan M. Griffin and Alan Nadel

This is the only book that compares the work of these 2 Masters of fiction and film, a provocative, rich pairing

Brings together a range of literary and film scholars and theorists, collecting new work by important and well-known critics

Features over 35 halftone illustrations

The Men Who Knew Too Much

Henry James and Alfred Hitchcock

Edited by Susan M. Griffin and Alan Nadel

Description

Henry James and Alfred Hitchcock knew too much. Self-imposed exiles fully in the know, they approached American and European society as inside-outsiders, a position that afforded them a kind of double vision. Masters of their arts, manipulators of their audiences, prescient and pathbreaking in their techniques, these demanding and meticulous artists fiercely defended authorial and directorial control. Their fictions and films are obsessed with knowledge and its powers: who knows what? What is there to know?

The Men Who Knew Too Much innovatively pairs these two greats, showing them to be at once classic and contemporary. Over a dozen major scholars and critics take up works by James and Hitchcock, in paired sets, to explore the often surprising ways that
reading James helps us watch Hitchcock and what watching Hitchcock tells us about reading James. A wide-range of approaches offer fresh insights about spectatorship, narrative structure, and cinematic representation, as well as the relationship between technology and art, the powers of silence, sensory-and sensational-experiences, the impact of cognition, and the uncertainty of interpretation. The essays explore the avowal and disavowal of familial bonds, as well as questions of Victorian convention, female agency, and male anxiety. And they fruitfully engage issues related to patriarchy, colonialism, national, transnational, and global identities. The capacious collection, with its brilliant insights and intellectual surprises, is equally compelling in its range and cogency for James
readers and film theorists, for Hitchcock fans and James scholars.

The Men Who Knew Too Much

Henry James and Alfred Hitchcock

Edited by Susan M. Griffin and Alan Nadel

Table of Contents

Reading James with Hitchcock, Reading Hitchcock with James, Susan Griffin and Alan NadelNational Bodies, Susan GriffinSecrets, Lies, and "Virtuous Attachments": The Ambassadors and The 39 Steps, Brenda Austin-SmithHenry James and Alfred Hitchcock after the American Century: Circulation and Non-Return in The American Scene and Strangers on a Train, Brian T. EdwardsColonial Discourse and the Unheard Other in Washington Square and The Man Who Knew Too Much, Alan NadelBump: Concussive Knowledge in James and Hitchcock, Mary Ann O'FarrellJames's Birdcage/Hitchcock's Birds, Patrick O'DonnellSounds of Silence in The Wings of the Dove and Blackmail, Donatella IzzoThe Perfect Enigma, Judith RoofHands, Objects and Love in James and
Hitchcock: Reading the Touch in The Golden Bowl and Notorious, Jonathan FreedmanThe Touch of the Real: Circumscribing Vertigo, Eric SavoySpecters of Respectability: Victorian Horrors in The Turn of the Screw and Psycho, Aviva BriefelCaged Heat: Feminist Rebellion in Henry James's In the Cage and Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window, John Carlos RoweShadows of Modernity: What Maisie Knew and Shadow of a Doubt, Thomas B. ByersAwkward Ages: James and Hitchcock In Between, Mark GobleWorks CitedContributorsIndex

The Men Who Knew Too Much

Henry James and Alfred Hitchcock

Edited by Susan M. Griffin and Alan Nadel

Author Information

Susan Griffin is a Distinguished University Scholar at the University of Louisville.

Alan Nadel is William T. Bryan Chair in American Literature and Culture at the University of Kentucky.

The Men Who Knew Too Much

Henry James and Alfred Hitchcock

Edited by Susan M. Griffin and Alan Nadel

Reviews and Awards

"Readers will be at once surprised and enlightened by the similarities discovered between Henry James and Alfred Hitchcock. These excellent essays persuasively and lucidly argue for a shared set of preoccupations in the works of the novelist and the filmmaker: preoccupations about personal and national identity, knowledge and authority, sexuality and gender. Each artist is shown to inspire new and important readings of the other. This is an original and highly readable contribution to literary and cultural studies."--Leo Bersani, University of California, Berkeley

"To 'read' these artists in tandem is to appreciate not only the special achievement of each, but the way great artists pursue a dialogue across time, across media, that allows us to honor the distinctive quality of James's narratives from a cinematic perspective, and the roots of Hitchcock's cinematic triumphs in daring novelistic experiments."--Lee Clark Mitchell, Princeton University